


home

by NoncanonGirlfriend



Category: Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
Genre: Alternate Ending, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Family, Gen, Post-Movie(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-12
Updated: 2016-08-12
Packaged: 2018-08-08 06:28:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7746697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NoncanonGirlfriend/pseuds/NoncanonGirlfriend
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(AU - T-800 isn't destroyed, Sarah and John and him live in a small house in a small town together.)</p><p>They're happy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	home

**Author's Note:**

> please james cameron sarah connor deserves happiness

"Day... something. I haven't recorded in a while, John. But I think this is more for me now. More of a verbal diary so I can get my stuff together. It's nice to be back in a four-walls-and-a-roof situation." Sarah references their constant weeks on the road with slight disdain.

She pauses to slice her knife through a carrot resting on the wet cutting board in front of her. Sunlight streams through, illuminating the thin layer of dust that coats everything in the kitchen. She studies the chipping yellow paint on the wall.

Sarah picks up the whirring tape recorder and clicks the little red button again. "I would have never thought that I'd get to raise you properly. Never thought I would be standing in a shabby little house in the middle of the Mexican nowhere cutting up a garden salad." She glances outside through the side door, where John is sweeping the cracked stone sidewalk in front of their house. "I'm glad that I got to. When you were born, I was on the run, I was nursing you in the back of beat-down gas stations, I was mashing up baby formula with someone's grandma in exchange for a little housework. That was when you were a tiny baby. My only thought was to keep you alive." 

The screen door opens, John shouts something back outside, and it slams shut again. Sarah grumbles, how many times has she told him to be gentle with that rusty old door?

She trails off from her sentence and eventually stops, staring at the sharp blade in her hand. A quick run under the water after tossing the carrots into the plastic bowl and both her hands and knife are clean. She sets it back in its place on the block and wipes her hands on her old shorts, taking a seat at the table in the center of the room.

For a while she turns the tape over in her hand, deciding to continue or just erase the recording. She can speak to John now. She doesn't have to do this anymore.

John's wheezy laughter bursts through the stagnant summer air and Sarah smiles to herself, holding down the record button.

"That day in the steel mill. With T-1000. God, John, I was so afraid I would lose you. I'm terrified of you being hurt or worse. I guess that's why I'm so hard on you." Faintly she can hear John swearing, probably from a stubbed toe due to loose cobblestone. "I knew we should have let T-800 lower it- himself. Every single thread in my body knew that that was the logical reason, let him die. Destroy Skynet forever, not a single trace of it left. You protested. You told me that Dyson was already gone, he had gotten rid of everything, that if T-800 remained alive it would be risky but nobody was after us anymore. We had changed the future. In the end it wasn't your words that convinced me. It was that you're my son."

Sarah remembers that day, remembers standing on a grate high above the ground, staring into a bubbling vat of molten steel. John, gripping T-800's bicep, the only true father figure the boy would ever have, his face red and wet from tears and sweat, choking out words between ragged gasps of air and sobs, the shocking display of pure emotion. 

"I guess maternal instinct ruled over reason," she muses, "and you know the rest. How we drove for months. I don't know if you'll remember this, but you complained so much. And now here we are." The tape continues rolling for several minutes, picking up dead air until Sarah twitches her thumb over the stop button. 

Slowly she eases herself up and works on the salad, turning over thoughts of Kyle in her mind. 

~~~

Night falls, and with it comes the bugs that drive John back into the house, sweaty and filthy with dirty on his palms and knees.

"Hey, kiddo, what happened to you?" Sarah jokes, scooping a helping onto a cheap faux-porcelain dish that John grabs from the cupboard. 

"Well-" he swings himself up into the chair, elbows on the table, hair plastered to his forehead- "T was helping me-" 

"You mean keeping you entertained-" Sarah bites her tongue before she finishes her sentence and John glares at her, mouth full with food and dressing on his cheek. 

"Yeah, whatever, Mom," he scoffs, "anyways I kinda got distracted and T's working on the car." He continues eating for a minute before standing up so fast he almost falls out of his chair, "SHIT I FORGOT TO GET HIM-" John wipes off his cheek while pulling on sneakers and dashing down the hall and outside once again.

In a minute he comes back in, locking the front door with the lace curtain behind him, holding onto T-800's hand. T-800 is stained with grease but otherwise no worse for the wear.

"Sorry," John sits down again and resumes eating.

Sarah shakes her head.

~~~

"A little help?", Sarah barks under her breath, folding countless tank tops and pinning them to the clothesline to dry. 

T-800 takes the hint and rises from his sitting position on the bench next to John, silently clipping clothes that have been washed so many times they're all the same shade of grey-brown onto the thin rope, suspended by the gutter hugging their vinyl siding house and a splintered piece of wood jutting out from the ground. John is perched with a book, illuminated by the light that shines from just above their door into the sand-covered yard. Out here their walls are the gaps between their house and the neighbors, the slots where they don't quite fit together, where the road cuts through.

John studies his book, mentally taking notes for when he starts school again in the fall. He promised Sarah one semester, and if he hates it or gets expelled, she'll teach him from home. His jumbled, painfully bad Spanish mingles with the night air, the cool breeze cuts through the humidity even at this hour. 

T-800 gives him a thumbs-up and a "very good, John." 

~~~

Another hour or so passes and Sarah is kneeling by the small bathtub, pushing the shower curtain aside, running a mix of cold and hot water. She sorts through the small bin, getting out shampoo and body wash, maneuvering around the cramped bathroom. When she stands up her back knocks against the sink, prompting her to turn around.

Her reflection greets her in the hanging mirror.

Sarah stares at herself, taking in everything under the orange light, her ratty hair (now cut close to her neck due to the heat), full lips and tired eyes, her broad face that tampers out at the bottom. Slight wrinkles on her forehead and maybe around her mouth, if anything from frowning so much. For once she tries smiling when she can see it and to her great surprise, it looks natural. She looks like one of the other countless haggard single moms out there, raising an unruly kid. Sarah tucks a lock of hair behind her ear and balances her elbows on the sink edge, wringing her hands together.

She's snapped back to reality by the sound of John clomping through the hall, quick as he always is, leaning on the door and pushing it open, almost falling into the room. "Mom- MOM! I'm 12, you don't have to run baths for me anymore!" 

"I wouldn't have to if you would shower more then once every 3 weeks."

"Like you do," John mutters under his breath, shoving Sarah out of the room on her heels. He clicks the lock behind her. 

She can hear him humming to himself through the thin wall.

~~~

Sarah lies in her bed, sheet kicked off to the floor, broken-down window fan blasting more warm than cold air into her face. Her room consists of a closet, a bedside table with a lamp, a dresser, and a tiny TV next to the floor-length mirror. For a long time she was sleeping on the same mattress on the middle of the living room floor as John, only recently did she earn enough from her cashier job for a real bed.

She drifts off to sleep listening to the sounds of John quietly playing an old Queen record and chattering away to T-800, who's taken to sleeping on a cot next to John's bed. 

Her dreams are filled with memories of painting his walls blue by herself, dragging in a desk and bed, a grungy beanbag they picked up for free and at the very end sitting on John's sagging bed, newly positioned by the window, and handing him a small cardboard box. A smile crosses her face at the sight in her mind, of John immediately laughing and hugging her and setting up his new Game Boy. 

~~~

The next morning she stumbles past the bathroom, into the living room with the ugly brown couch and small cross on the wall accompanied by stacks of books on the coffee table facing the thin windows, the kind with a smelly bug screen and smeared glass, through the next hallway that only houses a closet and stairway down to the cellar, into the kitchen.

John is just coming in from their barbed-wire-protected backyard, carrying a brown paper bag with the name of the local deli printed across it.

"Oh, here's your breakfast, Mom." He sets it down on the table and meanders past her, acting casual.

She hides her grin as she sips her coffee and takes a bite of an egg sandwich.


End file.
